Lucky Blue Smith and Cameron Dallas Cause a Frenzy in Milan

MILAN — “It’s the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Justin Bieber rolled into one,” said Joerg Koch, the editor of 032C, a Berlin-based art and fashion magazine. He was inside Gucci’s show space in a repurposed railway switching station near this city’s perimeter, and he was referring to the mobs clamoring all over the city for the new social media stars.

On Saturday, crowds of hundreds gathered outside Ralph Lauren’s 1941 Liberty-style palazzo here, erupting in screams whenever the American model and Internet phenomenon Lucky Blue Smith (@LuckyBSmith) came to a window. “I don’t really know what it’s all about,” Mr. Smith said later of his unlikely fame.

Then on Sunday, thousands more showed up unexpectedly and packed in behind hastily erected barricades outside the Calvin Klein show, hoping for a glimpse of Cameron Dallas. A 21-year-old sensation from Chino, Calif., Mr. Dallas began his career posting videos of himself, his family and friends on Vine for a lark. He now has 9.1 million followers on that platform.

“I started slowly,” Mr. Dallas said in a room where Calvin Klein’s social media wranglers had secreted a variant of celebrity not seen here before — certainly not during the sedate men’s wear shows — one whose reach far outstrips that of the usual front-row denizens. Basketball players, starlets and soccer players are so old culture, famous for actual accomplishments. In the new order, fame alone is the end point, the one true currency.

“I did the Vines first and then I chose Instagram because the filters were better and you could post the best picture of yourself, which I figured would help my modeling career,” Mr. Dallas said of his online presence. Modeling was an optimistic career goal given that he was 5-foot-6 at the time. In the interim Mr. Dallas has grown another two inches, and he has sufficient recognition that more people than live in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined have seen pictures of him taking a bubble bath.

“It all just built slowly,” Mr. Dallas said, an off-kilter grin settling over his face. “Slowly” is hardly the word for what amounts to an Internet space launch. From under a thousand followers at the beginning, he now has 5.96 million on Twitter and 9.5 million on Instagram.

“It’s a little bit crazy, no?” the model Mariacarla Boscono said at the Calvin Klein show, as she leaned out a second-floor window to capture the mayhem below (crowds chanting “Cam-E-Ron”) on her own iPhone.

Stranger still were the hordes of young Asian women pouring into via Mozart across town, just outside the Villa Necchi Campiglio, a sublimely elegant 1930s house museum that is the masterpiece of the architect Piero Portaluppi (and which many may know as the setting for the film “I Am Love”). Word had gotten out on the vast social media network of Wang Kai, the Chinese film and television star known in the West as Nick Wang, that he would be attending a presentation of the fall 2016 collection by the leather-goods powerhouse Tod’s.

Unlike the fans of Mr. Smith and Mr. Dallas, Mr. Wang’s had followed him in a literal sense, some from halfway around the world. Spilling onto the asphalt on Sunday, they held up mobile devices to snap photos of the star exiting his limousine. Then some laid their heads on a perimeter wall to sob.

Recovered, they were back out on in force on Monday, peering into a line of limos with blacked-out windows as they crept at earthworm pace into a packed parking lot at Gucci. Mr. Wang did turn up, dressed in a red-collared Gucci shirt and a jacket embroidered with birds and flowers. He stopped briefly to be photographed, including by this correspondent.

In just over an hour, a slightly fuzzy image of Mr. Wang posted to this reporter’s Twitter feed accumulated 110 retweets and 261 favorites. That kind of reach perhaps says everything one needs to know about the future of media, as Mr. Koch pointed out. “It’s a completely new world,” he said. “I really like it a lot, but it’s theirs. The rest of us are just visitors.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Cameron Dallas as Mr. Cameron in one instance.